Assignments

The individual assignments for this week are:

• measure something: add a sensor to a microcontroller board that you have designed and read it

What to make

For my final project, I want to be able to detect if I am putting weight on a hold, and if so, which hold. This would let me make quantitative measurements of my progress, as well as open the door for gamifying the training process.

Capacitive Touch

To do this, I decided to follow Neil’s code for a transit-receive step-response capacitive sensor. And I also recreated his circuit. For my experiment, I only used a single channel, instead of Neil’s two channels though.

For the pads, I just cut out two 2” pieces of copper tape. To make it a RC circuit, I needed a resistor, so I used 1.0 mega ohm resistors.

I soldered one leg of the resistors to the corners of the copper tape, and attached jumper wires to the other end of the resistors.

Then, I attacned the other ends of the jumper wires to the relevant pins on my board that I made in PCB week. That board also broke out all of the pins using header pins, so it was very easy to connect.

After putting it together, my setup looked as follows.

And here is a quick video of it working.